Gender thoughts 12/4

Now that I’m choosing to unpack and examine these feelings that I’m having, I’m finding it harder to not think about them nearly all the time. That moment when you start to notice the itch, you can’t stop noticing it.

I still have no idea what I want to do about them. Do I ask people to refer to me differently? But how do I want to be referred to? Do I start dressing differently? Again how? I’m not really one for fashion. Do I investigate hormones? I don’t know.

It’s hard to change my body and shape in the world into something that makes me happy when I don’t know what would make me happy.

It’s also hard when I have that constant anxiety nibbling at me. The fear that I’m an imposter. That I’m not dysphoric enough to be a “real” trans person. The fear that this is just my mental illnesses finding something to latch onto and it isn’t really who I am. The fear of how people will react if I do decide to change what shape I take up in the world.

Though I have some fear of how my friends and family with react, I am blessed to say that I don’t have much fear there. No, my fear is about everyone else. Work. Doctors. People on the street. New people I meet. People on the internet. Our government.

Now is not a safe time to be thinking these thoughts and having these feelings. But now is when I am. So how do I deal with that? That very valid fear that is mixed in with all the others.

And then of course is the fear that my anxiety and depression have latched onto this idea based on some fantasy that changing myself will fix me. But this isn’t likely to make my anxiety or depression go away. In fact, especially if I do take hormones, it is likely to make them worse, at least at first.

But where in the past, this kind of fear has caused me to shut down and stop thinking about whatever it is. Now I can’t stop thinking about it, despite the nearly full body panic it is keeping me in.

Disphoria

So I’ve been having a lot of gender feels lately.

Sort of.

I’m not really sure how best to put it. As gender isn’t quite right.

It’s more that I’m having feels about my body being shaped wrong. I mean, I’ve always felt that way, but I’ve never been quite sure how it should be. When I think about myself, my internal self-image of myself, it isn’t always the same. Though it is always consistent in a few ways.

The first of these is that it is nothing like how I look on the outside.

Seriously, I’ve always hated how I look, but the level of discomfort with my body has been growing rapidly over the past few years. Yes some of that is my weight, and my chronic pain, and losing my hair. And some of that is connected to my sense of self-worth around sexuality, and working on coming to terms and understanding my a-sexuality.

But a lot of it as just me. The shape of my face (too round). My height (too short, but also too big). My hands and fingers (blunt and stubby). My body shape (too square). My body hair. My facial hair. My genitals. All of these things are wrong. They are not how I see myself on the inside.

I would say I hate them, that I hate this body. And I do. But mostly I’m too tired to hate anymore. To exhausted by not feeling like me to feel particularly strongly about almost anything.

Anyway. Pulling myself back on topic before I fall too far down that particular hole.

The other consistency is that my internal self image, though fluid, mostly bounces between a few specific things. None of which are really male.

I should be tall and thin and lanky. With long thin fingers. Androgynous features. With no body hair.

I should be strong. Broad shoulders over a somewhat curvy body. Moderate size breasts. And hair that I can play with and style and color.

I should be small and soft.

I don’t know what to do with this dick. I don’t have any particular use for it. I was to rub my clit and feel my insides when I masterbate. When I feel desire, or am horny, it’s in my pelvis not my dick. It’s like it isn’t even really connected to me. And when I play with someone else all my desire is in my hands and my teeth. In my neck and my chest. In my mind, not my crotch.

My breasts have been drawing my attention more and more of late. The hair on them disgusts me. The shape of them is wrong. And they want to be touched, but they feel wrong when I do.

My entire life I’ve wanted to change my body. But I’ve never had a clear idea of what I wanted to change it into. I’ve always wished my body was moldable. A shapeshifter who could become anything I want.

I’ve always felt like a chrysalis waiting to rip open and have the real me come out. I’ve wanted to grab ahold of my seams and rip myself apart so I can crawl out. Hell I literally pull at the back of my head like I’m ripping a seam apart almost everyday as a mental trick to refocus myself when I’m feeling overwhelmed.

Despite all this I’ve never really thought of myself as trans. And only just started thinking about whether that is something I want. I’ve never thought about it partly because I don’t feel like a woman. But I don’t feel like a man. I’ve never felt comfortable in ‘men’s’ spaces. I doubt I’d feel any more comfortable in women’s spaces. But the more I think about it, and the more I try to explore what my sexuality is and who I am, the less comfortable I am with body I am in, and the more I find myself thinking about my body with different parts. It’s been too easy to let it slide. To ignore what I’ve felt about myself or to chalk it up to general depression/self image issues. To let myself live with the privileges I was born with. The privilege to hide who I am and just pass as another “normal” person. I’ve always felt invisible in so many ways, and as depressing as that has been, it’s also easy. Every way I’ve been different my whole life has been invisible. Being pagan. Having chronic joint pain and migraines since I was a kid. Being Bi. Being Poly. Having anxiety and periodic bouts of depression. Being Asexual. Being Gender Fluid, or Non-Binary, or Trans, or what ever this is that I’m not even sure of yet. It’s always been easier to let people see what they wanted to see, rather than letting them see all of me. I’ve always tried to surround myself with people who would choose to see things that were close to the truth. I have even tried showing people a little of who I am on occasion. But almost never all of it. Because it’s easier.

But I’m not sure it is actually easier anymore. It’s been getting more intense. Bubbling up. The discomfort has been breaking through the armor of apathy that I’ve built up. It’s consuming my thoughts and distracting me from the rest of life. Distracting me from the things I care about and that make me happy. I don’t know that I could ever make my body something that makes me happy. But I think it’s time I stopped ignoring it, and started figuring out how to make it something that I don’t hate being trapped in.

But I don’t know how. I’m scared. And tired. And hurting. And really really tired. Tired of hating myself. Tired of being trapped in a body that is wrong.
But short of ripping off my skin and hoping there is more than flesh and blood underneath. I don’t know what to do.

Fatherhood part 1

I can't say I know anything about being a father. My child was born all of three days ago. I thought I would have more time to prepare myself for this. At least to prepare the house, to find a job, to feel like I might not be utterly terrible at this.

I haven't even gotten a chance to hold her yet (my wife has, and I was there for one of those times, but I wanted to let her have that moment first), but I'm already feeling different about it. I guess the best word is serene. Not that I won't start freaking out again soon, my anxiety won't let me go too long before it comes back to play, but for now I'm actually feeling fairly good about this.

Hopeful and optimistic even.

I have a beautiful child. The birth wasn't what we had hoped for or wanted, and it was two months sooner then we had expected, but you know what? She is healthy. My wife is healthy. Our family is healthy and happy and growing, and growing stronger for all of it. This past week and a half of being in the hospital has been very hard, very stressful. But it has also been amazing in a way. Amazing what the four of us are willing and able to do for one another. Amazing what our friends and family and other partners are willing and able to do for us. The show of both support, and respect has been so heart warming. Offering their help, and expressing their concern and love, while also giving us the space we need to not become overwhelmed. The space we needed to focus on what was happening and the choices we needed to make. And the space now, to focus on recovery, and on our new child.
So I don't know anything about being a father, but the first lesson I am learning is to let go of expectations. I no longer have control of my life in the ways I did before, and that is something I will need to come to terms with. I have always been a fairly 'go with the flow' kind of person in many respects, but I also have a strong sense of needing my own space, both in a physical and temporal sense. I think I will always need that, but now I need to learn how to accommodate for the need to share that space more often than not. And that I won't always have control over defining that space.

And I am ok with that.

Heatstroke

   So I've had this character bouncing around in my head for ages. Originally he started as part of an AU X-Men fanfic story I was playing with in high school. The story, kind of inevitably, took place, or at least started, in high school. The story as I remember it was a coming of age, coming to terms with new powers, etc, kind of story.

   Heatstroke, who I've never settled on a 'normal' name for, was one of the pseudo-villains of the story. He was a bully, a football jock who had self esteem issues and took them out on other people. He was big and strong, popular among the football crowd but had a bit of a temper and when he got angry he got cruel instead of loud. He wasn't the 'pull the wings off butterflies' kind of cruel, but he wasn't the 'just beat up the kid who got in his way' kind of bully either. He was the 'shove the claustrophobic kid in his own locker' kind of bully. He was also reasonably intelligent, though he tried to hide it behind his jock persona.
   As I remember the story I had been creating then, various characters were developing their powers, and you know, mutant scare. Heatstroke obviously bullied these new mutants, calling them freaks, etc. Right up until he himself started showing powers. Heatstroke's ability is Thermokinesis. He can manipulate his own body temperature and the temperatures around him. Initially he was not in control, and only affected temperature in large areas and based on his moods. He gained the nickname Heatstroke when he would cause the temperatures around him to raise drastically when he got angry, often giving people heatstroke. As he learned to control his powers he found he was able to also reduce temperatures, and to focus the power down to smaller areas if he chose. He also found he was himself effectively immune to temperature as his body would self regulate to protect itself.

   So I never went anywhere with the original story. It was a tad too generic, I hadn't really come up with a good plot or reason for the story, and frankly I have always had trouble with trying to write fanfiction. I should probably dedicate a post to that set of thoughts by themselves. Anyway.

   Over the years this character keeps coming back to me. There is something about him I've always really liked. He is so different from many of the characters that have stuck with me over the years. Most of them are various reflections of myself, or self insert characters that have slowly evolved over time into their own things. Some are based off of friends, aspects of who they are that struck me and developed in my mind into interesting characters. But Heatstroke is neither of those. He is the image of the kind of person I disliked, though thankfully never had to deal with in my own school days, humanized into an interesting person, if still not a good person.
   As I grew so did this character, I don't have a story for him yet, though I have written him up as an NPC/villain for the Super-Hero game I'm going to be running. But in my mind his story has continued. After high school, between being a decent but not amazing football player and being a mutant, he didn't go to college. Near the end of the time he was in school he got in some trouble with the law, nothing major, and his abilities were never overtly part of it, but it made people start to fear him. In the end his father died of severe heatstroke, it was ruled an accident by the police, but there were rumors. He left his home town, moving to the city to escape the people who knew what he was and feared him. He didn't have any real skills, and was angry at the world for as he saw it 'ruining his chances at a football scholarship by making him a freak'. He ended up working construction and other physical labor jobs. Some of the people he worked with were ex-cons, and eventually they got him going on jobs with them. He finally found a use for his powers and started learning how to control them better. And thus was born the 'Super-Villain' Heatstroke. I picture him being in and out of jail in his early twenties, until he learns how to not get caught. He learns to use his powers with deadly precision, boiling a person's brain, or freezing their heart. He also learns he doesn't like to kill if he can help it. Killing is messy, it upsets people, and frankly he doesn't like how it makes him feel. He prefers burglary, and becomes a B&E specialist. He can melt a whole in a door or freeze a safe lock to make it breakable. Over time I picture him becoming calmer, less driven by anger and more just trying to live his life using the skills and abilities he has.
  One of my favorite scenes that I came up with recently involved a bank robbery gone south, where the crew he is with ends up stuck in the bank with hostages, trying to figure out how to get out. The cops of course cut off the power and air conditioning. A basic hostage negotiation tactic, cut off the air so it gets uncomfortably hot inside and the hostage takers are distracted and more likely to make a mistake. Except Heatstroke can just compensate and keep himself and his team cool.

I guess that's all I've got on Heatstroke at the moment. Maybe I'll try writing out that scene later.

Anxiety

I've been struggling with anxiety a lot. I mean, it's something I always have to deal with in some form or another, and have my entire life. But the last few days have been piling it on pretty high.

There's a lot going on in my life, and a lot of challenges that I'm working to overcome. But every time I try to sit down to write, or draw, or do anything creative or productive it's like my brain freaks out and goes blank.

Sometimes I get these intrusive thoughts that lead to looping internal dialogs with myself. Berating myself for not being better or doing more. Running through possible discussions or arguments I should have with someone and probably won't ever have. And the worst one is when my mind goes blank, but it's not just blank and empty, that would at least be calm. It's like I'm having those internal arguments with myself, but so loudly and angrily that my conscious mind has been deafened to it. Like when you were a kid and in your room with the music turned up so you can't hear your parent's arguing and yelling, but you know they are, you can feel it in your bones. Or when your parents' got mad at you and they were yelling at you about something and you just tuned out and stopped listening, just waiting for them to be done. It's like my mind is doing that to itself. I know something's wrong. I know there is some voice in my head yelling and screaming about something, trying to tell me horrible things. I can viscerally feel it in my entire body, the fear, the anger, the guilt. But I don't know why, I don't know what is causing it, I don't even know what subject my subconscious has latched onto today to be upset about. All I know is I can't focus on anything, and that I need to turn up the volume and hide from it until it goes away. Wait until the argument in the next room in my mind has run it's course. Wait until the mind voice has given up berating me, cause I'm obviously not actually listening. So instead of the useful things I want to do. Things that would help me feel better. Things that would give me less reason to feel useless and guilty and anxious. The only thing I can do is turn up the volume on the TV, listen to music, play a game, anything and everything I can to drown out the screaming I can't even actually hear.

Cont. Thoughts on Superpowers and Insecurities

So writing that last post got me thinking about the desire for superpowers, and the personal insecurities that lead to the desires for different types of powers.

I went into my personal insecurities in relation to the powers I listed, at least on a surface level.

But the question I'm pondering at the moment is how do we seperate the desire for powers "because they are cool" from the desire "because they would allow us to be free of something we hate about ourselves". And perhaps how to find the desire for powers that would actually allow us to grow as individuals, rather than being a crutch we can use to avoid or escape our own fears and shortcomings.

Perhaps seperate is not the right word. Because these aspects can't be completely separated. We desire powers because they are cool. We desire them because they would allow us to be more than we are. We desire powers that should free us from the things we hate about ourselves. These are intertwined and they should be. But to understand ourselves we need to look at each piece separately. And to understand a character we need to do the same. For a character to be real they have to have those same internal struggles they do. They need to be a representation of someone real. What superpowers would the character want? Why? What about themselves and their life do they internally struggle with so much that they desire the ability to magically make it go away. And if that character does have powers, is that power the one that they had needed/desired? Does it really make the issue go away or just change it? Does it make a new issue they they struggle with now? Or is the power completely irrelevant to their own internal issues?

I'm preparing to Co-GM a superhero RPG with a friend, and I have been creating a lot of NPCs, partially as a way for making sure I understand the system well enough to run it, and partially to make sure I have sufficiently populated the world the players are going to be in. Some of these NPCs are obviously going to be various levels of based off of existing characters throughout the genre. When I have trouble coming up with a character concept I turn to comics and tv-shows. But the interesting characters are ones who I've taken the time to get into their minds. Even if these are supposed to be easy one-shot baddies, intimately knowing the character and what makes them tick really helps me, especially when it's time to play the character.

But now I'm starting to go back and think about these characters not just from the questions of "what do they do in the world", "how do they interact with society now that they have powers", "what motivates them to act", etc. Now I'm asking "what do they hate about themselves?", "how do they use their powers in relation to those insecurities?", "do they use their powers as a crutch or as a tool for making their lives better?".

And perhaps the more interesting question is, "how can I use these characters to explore my own insecurities in a safe environment?".

Thoughts on Questions posed to me

So last night a friend posed a few interesting questions to me, that got me thinking. The content of this post I actually wrote last night, and really was what pushed me to make this blog so I had somewhere to put these thoughts.

1. If you had one Super/Magical power what would it be, not per say the one you most want, but the one you think fits you/your personality the best.

So obviously the ones that came to mind are the three main powers that have bounced around in my head for most of my life. Telekinesis, Telepathy/Emotional Control, and Shapeshifting.

Quick synopsis of what I mean by those and my thoughts on them:

Telekinesis: When I say this I mean strong and detailed Telekinesis with  a telekinetic awareness of my surroundings to a minute detail. This is the power I desire the most at this point in my life. The ability to affect and control the world around me directly. Part of why I desire this power the most is I see it as the one that would in effect be the weakest of the powers in how much control it would give me to the world around me, and thus would be the easiest to keep myself from abusing, while still giving me substantial power and significant ability to improve my life. I think my desire for this power stems from a sense of frustration at not being able to affect the world around me the way I would like. I am not strong, I have troubles with motivation and energy. If I could affect the world around me with my mind I could be so much more, and I could also use this power to help improve myself. I always think of the Telekinetic in the comic Crux, who used his powers to make himself stronger, fitter, physically more effective. I could constantly and slowly strengthen my body by pushing against myself, making basic tasks harder to train my body, and then when I chose to turn that off my body itself would be that much better even without using the power. And then with it I could do amazing things. Also it would let me fly… And that would be fucking amazing.

Telepathy/Emotional Control: When I say this think of a mix of Jean Grey’s telepathy (weaker than Xavier’s) and the Mule from Foundation and Empire (by Asimov). The ability to read people’s thoughts and emotions, to understand them, what they are thinking, what they mean, what they are feeling, towards me, towards one another, and towards themselves. And then the ability to change how they are feeling, probably not to directly control their minds, but to change how they feel about things, about me, about themselves. This is the power that I think fits me the most closely, and that scares me a little. This is also the power I think would be the easiest to abuse. I would want to help people, to help cure people’s anxieties and depressions, and my own, but I am not really a good person. It would be easy for me to take it further. Use it to make money, to make people respect me, to make people I like like me back. I could also easily see myself using it to harm people who I thought deserved it, or at least change them so fundamentally that they ceased being who they were. Change crooked politicians, criminals, abusers. The list of people I would be tempted to use this power on is long. I believe I have strong self control, but I’m not sure anyone with this kind of power could resist using it to reshape the people and world around them into how they think it should be. And yet I think this is the power that fits my personality the best. This stems from my frustration with my own mind and anxieties. And with the people around me. It would let me make my mind healthier, and make the people I care about healthier. It would also let me understand the people around me better. And it would give me control of my social interactions. I am so often crippled by my social anxiety, limited in how I interact and with whom. If I could understand these people, what they were thinking, what they were feeling, and even control what they were feeling, which would in turn control how they think. It’s something I have always desired, deeply. They key would be learning how and where to draw a line for myself.

Shapeshifting: This is full molecular and genetic control over my body. The ability to make myself stop hurting. To heal myself. To make myself healthy. To make myself fit and strong. To make my body work, my sex drive work, my brain work. To make myself look how I want to look and any given time. To make myself physically female or male or other at will. To make myself an animal, or a mythological creature at will. Sometimes when I think about this power it includes the ability to absorb other matter to increase my mass, or shape and shed it to decrease it. This would give me the power of creation and destruction. Often I don’t include those, though increasing or decreasing my mass in some way would seem to be important for this power. Though this is neither the power that I desire the most at this point in my life, nor the one I think fits me the best at this point in my life, it is one I have desired pretty much my entire life, possibly the longest of any of them. And throughout most of my life this power could easily have been the most fitting for my self image and personality. This stems from my own self hatred. I have always felt out of place in my body. This has never felt like how I should look, or feel, or move, or be. At times I feel masculine, and at times I feel feminine, but most of the time I don’t feel either. I have never really felt properly human. My self image has nothing to do with what my body looks like. My masculine self image is tall and thin, lanky thin. Too thin. Spider like. And bird like. My feminine self image is of medium to tall height, broad and strong. A warrior woman. Capable and active. A sexual being, and perhaps the only part of my self image that really is, but I’m not sure how to explain it. Perhaps I should explore these thoughts of self image and sexuality in a separate piece. The piece of my self image that perhaps fits me and my body the best is the inhuman one. The Grotesque. The Gargoyle. The hunched, powerful, and mute protector. The one with claws and wings. The one with skin of stone or steel. The one with no mouth, and yet has teeth. The one with no voice. The one who observes, and acts, to protect. There are more pieces to my identity that are starting to evolve, but as I said, I think I’ll explore that part elsewhere. The ability to shift would allow me to truly be each and everyone of these parts of my self image as I felt the need, and would let me stop being what I am now, this thing that I hate. This power would also let me live forever. Or at least as long as I desired.

2. If you had an intense love/relationship/romance etc with a paranormal creature, from Paranormal Romances/Urban Fantasy/Mythology, what would it be.

This one took me a while to ponder, while we talked about other things. There are as many different versions of every paranormal or mythological creature as there are stories of them. Each author has their own take. Vampires are too undead… which is icky. The closest would be a White Court Vampire from The Dresden Files, and that would be… challenging. The sex would be fantastic, and would easily overcome my bodies stupidness, but would easily be lethal. And if love really was involved and reciprocated it would be even harder, though my polyamorous nature would help with that some. Werewolves or other therianthropes? Though I could fall for any given individual, them being such a shifter would not be a source of attraction, I’m the one who wants to be able to shift, and not just into an animal. So even if they could turn me into one of them it would not be my ideal, and still not a real reason for an attraction. As I pondered my mind kept coming back to the Denarians… but not. It finally struck me. Something like Lash. Not Lashiel, but Lash, the imprint after she became her own being. Also like Bob or Harry’s child with Lash. A spirit, an immaterial being who could share space in my mind, as well as be separate. Someone who could share experiences with me, who could communicate with me deeply and intimately. Someone who can teach me and learn from me. Someone who can share other lovers with me, share those moments, feel what I feel and understand it. Someone who can help me to better understand myself and the world around me. Perhaps that truly exemplifies how I am a Demisexual. The desire to have that sort of deeply intellectual and emotional connection. Yes following the story this image comes from they could form illusions and feelings that would allow us to have a form of physical intimacy, but that is an aspect I see as secondary, and simply a way for expression of intimacy and desire. But the intellectual and emotional aspects are truly what draw me to this idea, this ideal of a Paranormal Paramour.